


from the dust comes all things beautiful

by closingdoors



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric, aka i'm having Tony Emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-13 09:39:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14746407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closingdoors/pseuds/closingdoors
Summary: He is soft and hopeful like his mother, his cold metallic suit too much like his father.





	from the dust comes all things beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> There was a star riding through the clouds one night, and I said to the star: consume me.  
> \- Virginia Woolf.

He has never felt loss so physically. His mother and father had walked out of the door and not returned. Steve Rogers had left him with a letter and a cell phone. Yensin had closed his eyes.

The boy turns to ashes in his hands, drifts in the air he breathes. 

The boy turns to ashes, and Tony doesn't.

 

 

The panic attacks had never really stopped. The tinkering - that had stopped for a while. Just being Iron Man for the Avengers and coming home to find Pepper, safe and warm and alive, had been enough. There had been no more suits to hurt her when she had woken him from nightmares. Those moments, the space between his world and the missile he'd released, had punctured his dreams so little that he had fooled himself into thinking that he might never be happy, but he would be okay.

But just okay had not been enough - Pepper left. She had pulled her hair up too tight against her head and watched him in the mirror one morning. There hadn't been suits to attack her, but spare parts littered across their floor, just little somethings to keep his brain active. Iron that she avoided with her bare feet. She had looked at him and he had known. She had kissed him and she had left. He fought for the accords to keep the world she was in safe.

_He's my friend._

_So was I._

Pepper is already home when he gets there and follows him as he sits in the shower, fully-clothed and bloodied. 

Her white blouse is see-through by the time she cleans his torso. Her knees are bruised by the time he remembers how to breathe again. 

 

 

The tinkering he couldn't control, the boy he couldn't control either. Tony thinks too much about his father. He thinks too much about Steve Rogers.

Pepper smiles when he suggests children, laughs like it's ridiculous. He promises her promises he'll never keep. 

He is soft and hopeful like his mother, his cold metallic suit too much like his father.

 

 

When he and Rhodey were younger, it had been easier to hide the damage. Alcohol and women had been on-hand. Tony had been a genius, a man who laughed and threw parties despite his orphanage, his friend a soldier who rose through the ranks quickly. They had impressed the sharpest of minds everywhere they went.

Even after meeting Steve Rogers, he believes Colonel James Rhodes to be the best soldier he has ever known. Pepper leaves and Rhodey fights to fill in all the space she left behind. 

But Tony still has to face a cold bed at night. He wakes from dreams where everyone he loves is dead and there is no soft voice to convince him otherwise. 

 

 

Under the water, sound is muted. Everything above the surface is far-away and cannot touch him. He keeps his eyes closed under the water, always has since he was a child, and lets out a lungful of air, hears it pop as bubbles against the surface. Pepper's arms rope around him and he tilts his head back against her chest, his nose breaking into the air. The boy had turned to ash in his hands after he had told him he was okay. Pepper's hands are flat against his sternum, her hair floating around his ears. Tony takes another breath and sinks under once more.

 

 

Pepper doesn't understand. Before Steve Rogers drops the shield his father made for him, before Aldrich Killian tries to rip her from him, she doesn't understand. 

She sits on the stairs sometimes and watches, her blazer sleeves rolled up to her elbows, hair falling freely around his shoulders, and she is loyal enough that she doesn't pretend to understand.

Tony tinkers.  _I am Iron Man,_ he told them years ago, but he's just a mechanic. He has watched a demigod bring the wrath of thunder and lightning down through a hammer Tony will never pick up. He has watched a humble and quiet man burst into a green rage-fuelled killing machine. He has watched one agent take down a group of aliens with her thighs and another bring them down without looking where his arrow was going to land. He has watched Steve Rogers, his father's golden boy, wielding that shield as a weapon and a defence. 

He's a man in a can. He tinkers and tinkers and tinkers hoping someday he'll be good enough, even if his father is long gone, even if that means he'll never earn his pride.

He's seen it. He carried a nuke up into a place of the universe he didn't even know existed, and he has always prided himself on being a know-it-all. He closed his eyes to a failed phone call and an apocalypse of aliens closing in on him. 

Pepper's fingers press against the nape of his neck. They scratch through his hair briefly before she kisses his temple and heads to bed. She loves him, and he's missing it, but he has to keep her safe. He has to keep everyone safe. He almost died for it once before. He'll do it again.

 

 

When he finds Pepper afterwards, he cannot hear. There's not even a ringing in his ears. There's just - nothing. Her mouth moves,  _Tony!,_ and the purple-blue alien beside him stands rigid as Pepper propels herself into his arms. He clasps her tighter than he should. He must be hurting her. She doesn't turn to ash in his arms. He's stored the boy in a compartment inside his suit.

He feels her lips move against the shell of his ear, but no sound reaches him. He keeps breathing because of this: the beat of her heart through her chest, the smell of vanilla, the absence of rust.

 

 

When he had fought for his life in Afghanistan, the thought had occurred to him that he didn't know  _why._ Yensin longed to reunite with his family again. The only person who had ever loved Tony was dead. He'd not even said goodbye to her when she left. Obadiah had been the one to break the news of the crash to him, and for a few years he had been too drunk to remember it'd even happened. 

He wears the suit, he kills those holding him hostage, but he doesn't know why.

Years later, he pilots a missile out of the sky, and half of him doesn't want to make it back.

 

 

In retrospect, he has had blood on his hands for decades, he'd simply been too blind to realise it. He'd made weapon after weapon and called his country safe.

Obadiah had dealt the weapons to the terrorists, but Tony had made them. One of them embeds shrapnel in his chest. If he'd had a heart before his palladium one, shouldn't he have felt it?

 

 

Pepper's voice on the phone is crackly, tired.  _Come home._

He does. That's the worst part.

 

 

Wanda shows him. The world is cold.  _You could've saved us,_ Steve says. Tony makes Ultron and he almost kills them all. He makes Vision and he saves them all. When he finally goes home, JARVIS is gone, of course, and the house is cold, but everyone is alive.

 

 

He had been so scared to touch her. The news had run footage of the expo and after he'd freed himself of his suit he'd switched it off. Too much fire and shattered glass for his liking.

The look in Pepper's eyes was different then. Almost nervous. She'd always been his one touchstone of stability, it'd spooked him to see that look on her. But her hands didn't shake when she took his and lead him to the bedroom for the first time. She'd undressed him before she undressed herself. She'd gasped when the arc reactor brushed against her bare skin. And then she'd smiled, and he wasn't afraid anymore.

 

 

_I just wanted to be like you._

_And I wanted you to be better._

He goes home and opens the drawer he keeps Rogers' letter in. This same drawer used to be cluttered with drawings from kids. Pepper had collected them without him asking. He doesn't know what she's done with them. He doesn't care to know, either.

He's the one that has to keep them all safe. The others - even the boy - have remarkable gifts, but someone has to be there to reign them in. Someone has to be there to take the fall for them. Someone has to be the one to fly a missile into a wormhole.

_I see a suit of armour around the world._

_Sounds like a cold world, Tony._

_I've seen colder._

 

 

The alien that'd brought him home leaves, but Pepper stays by his side. She deserves better. He tells her as much, delirious on pain medication and grief, but he means it. She tells him he does, too.

 

 

When Obadiah had betrayed him, a part of him hadn't been surprised. It was a hollow, carved-out hole low in his gut, that had almost expected this to happen. Obadiah's affection had always been rough, brash, though he was the only person Tony had after his parents had died, even if it was only in a professional capacity. 

JARVIS showed him a reserved kind of affection, but only because he worked as intended. Pepper rolled her eyes and hid a smile at everything he said, but she too was there to work. Rhodey only ever got leave from his work to see what weapons he'd built for the army. He can count on one hand how many people he loves. He cannot count how many love him out of choice.

Obadiah tries to kill him and fails, but Tony begins to die anyway.

 

 

They don't leave Titan for a long time. The alien - Nebula? - salvages parts and Tony tries to collect what was left of the kid. His brain knows that it's futile. They've already lost. What is left to go home for? Half of the world is dead. It surely cannot keep spinning. 

He gets cell reception once they enter the Earth's atmosphere. Pepper picks up after one ring. Tony finds that, somehow, from this high up, he can still see the planet turning.


End file.
